Sustain Impact: Donor Practices To Grow Enterprise Support Organisations

Over $US1.3 billion in sovereign donor funds flow annually to business development services that support private sector development. These are services that assist entrepreneurs and small businesses to improve and scale, including those offered by accelerators, incubators, professional services, chambers of commerce, economic development organisations, trade associations, and funders and professional service firms – collectively known in the sector as Enterprise Support Organisations (ESOs). With restrictive donor funding models, however, ESO growth is constrained. The Argidius Foundation, a champion of best practice in this sector, approached Snowmelt with the goal of highlighting this issue to catalyse a new sector wide conversation.

What mattered to the sponsor was that a sector-wide conversation could be created on this issue. With this in mind, the process engaged stakeholders strategically through interviews and workshops with over 30 organisations, and 40+ participants. This network of progressive donors and ESOs has been critical to expanding the narrative to have global reach. The report itself has had a strong resonance with donors. The report’s creative design draws on metaphors and visualisation to engage the reader and draw them towards self-reflection and actions in the form of recommendations and internal conversation prompts to start new discussions inside donor organisations.

Since publication, several follow-on projects have been scoped including specific translations of the report’s recommendations for international government agencies. Interested and engaged international agencies include USAID (USA), FMO (Netherlands) and the European Commission. Anecdotally, it has been reported that funding has already been reallocated in some agencies towards ESO development. Commercially, this enhances an ESOs’ abilities to support SMEs, driving economic growth and innovation across many regions. Environmentally, the focus on sustainable business practices among SMEs has fostered sustainable transitions. By bolstering ESOs and SMEs, this project has contributed to job creation, poverty reduction, and increased access to essential services.

”Sustain Impact” was created with an inclusive design process that invited a wide range of stakeholders to participate, ensuring solutions were grounded in real-world needs and challenges. Significant effort was made in the process to engage stakeholders on their terms and ensure their perspectives could be heard and reflected in the report. These included in-depth interviews, workshops, regular comms, and document iteration cycles with 40+ participants. It was crucial current policy practices we portrayed positively to engage donors. The story built on this foundation, showing the further impact advantages made possible with adapted approaches. The report uses rich metaphors from nature to explain how growth is enabled by looking at the whole of the organisation, and recognising how to support it in its ecosystem. The report itself was designed to meet how donors consume information and justify decisions. It’s full of grounded case studies, simple frameworks, and actionable recommendations that speak to the realities of sovereign donor processes, encouraging minor shifts that will have outsized impact on ESOs. ”Sustain Impact” was published in September 2023 and therefore has no confidentiality clauses.